Personalized Grit Lab Report

Hi Rebecca,

Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab report!

We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.

We hope this will help you reflect on what you learned and experienced during Grit Lab.

Here's how you started. On week one, after learning the basics of grit:

• You rated your passion as Stage 4: I have an interest I'm actively pursuing, voluntarily devoting more than 3 hours of "free time" each week

• ...and your perseverance as Stage 4: Other people would tell you that I hold myself to a standard that is higher than what is explicitly asked of me.

Here's a graph:

Then, you learned about goal setting, planning, and deliberate practice.

You established a wish, imagined its associated outcome, identified potential personal obstacles, and then planned accordingly, using implementation intentions.

Did it go according to plan?

And here is how much you learned

In week four, we discussed feedback.

You told us that you felt "I like it! I wish I got more critical feedback, because I feel that people often don't do it enough." when receiving negative feedback,

...and "Happy" when recieveing positive feedback.

We then turned to learning about stress.

In week 5, you reported feeling "NA" of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being NA.

We also talked about adversity and failure.

Although related, adversity and failure are different:

Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.

Perhaps that is why you said that failure had made you feel NA.

However, how we interpret stress and failure matters...

You said that you believe it is NA that the effects of stress are negative and should be avoided,

...and that it is NA that stress facilitates learning and growth.

Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being and health.

On week six, we talked about mentors

...you said for you, your most important mentor was manager.

Here's how you described him or her:

You also wrote a gratitude letter to someone else. Do you remember what you said and how it made you feel?

On week eight, we talked about interest.

You saw this picture.

You rated it as

10/10 in enjoyment,

6/10 in interestingness, and

5/10 in novelty.

What about Francis Bacon's Head Surrounded by Sides of Beef?

You rated it as

0/10 in enjoyment,

9/10 in interestingness, and

8/10 in novelty.

Prior research has shown that for most people, what is interesting is not necessarily related to what is enjoyable.

We talked about states of extreme interest, or as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would call it, flow.

You said you had experienced flow when running.

How do you feel when you are running and get into the flow state?

We then transitioned into values.

There, you said you preferred to gain knowledge, have approval from yourself and be spontaneous.

These responses, in a sense, spoke about what you valued.

You wrote a This I Believe essay, and located it here in Schwartz's value circle:

For strengths, Danny gave us an interesting lecture on the nature of talent.

You defined talent as ability.

You ranked your talents as Analytic, Verbal, Social, Kinesthetic, Artistic / Spatial, Musical, Spiritual.

You said your personality strength was Openness.

We then examined demand and social impact. Here's how you said you cared about salary vs. social impact for your first career move:

We also asked why you worked hard.

You said you neither agree nor disagree to working hard for wanting to help others,

...and you disagree with working hard because you enjoy it.

Regarding demand, you said the most serious issues affecting your country were

Inequality (income, discrimination), Lack of political freedom/political instability, Lack of infrastructure, Climate change, Lack of education, Lack of economic opportunity and employment, Poverty, Loss of privacy due to technology, Religious conflicts, Safety/security/well-being, Government accountability / corruption.

Would you like to work towards these?

We then talked about goal hierarchies, which require you to have a top-level goal. How clear is your top-level goal? You said: "I have a general intuition but nothing specific yet".

Over time and with self-reflection, this will get clearer and clearer.

One particular goal you have for the next six months is to study for GRE.

You rated that goal in terms of how much it really represents you. Here’s what you said:

## Warning: Removed 4 rows containing missing values (position_stack).

Finally, on the penultimate lecture we looked at paying it forward.

We learned about reciprocity style: givers, takers, and matchers. You also responded to items about prosocial purpose.

Here are your responses to items surveying this:

After all this time, we hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.

Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?

Drumroll please...

Don't worry if the rubric doesn't yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.

In any case, grit is not built in a day...

...so stay passionate and persevering on the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working hard, and paying it forward.

With grit and gratitude,

Angela and the Grit Lab team.